My Thoughts on the Film, The Death of Stalin (2017), 2/15/2026…

It always strikes me how an artist can take something horrible, or someone horrible—or a committee of horrible people—and poke so much fun at the subject that audience members laugh—and cringe—despite themselves.

Filmmaker Armando Iannucci (Veep) is just such an artist, and his film, The Death of Stalin, is just such an example. Even the film’s tagline, “A Comedy of Terrors,” says much of what the auteur accomplished here.

The film centers around the titular event and the chaos that ensued thereafter. Members of the Politburo—Laventiy Beria, Nikita Kruschev, Georgy Malenkov, among others—scrambled about, trying to figure out what to do and who would lead, after the dictator’s demise.

The bathroom alliances, the backstabbing, and the finger-pointing all encapsulated the fearful disarray the members masterminded, engaged in, and suffered. (Kruschev ultimately won this struggle…until Brezhnev, that is).

The comedy herein derives from the fear and the indecision of these committee members. Meetings are literally a joke, with key members vying for power. The bickering surrounding the motorcade that was to follow Stalin’s corpse out of the Kuntsevo Dacha is, hands down, one of the funniest moments in the film.

The performances are outstanding. Iannucci decided to take a nod from Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Inner Circle, another film about Stalin’s Politburo, where he allowed the actors to use their natural accents instead of them learning the Russian ones. In other words, Steve Buscemi’s Brooklyn dialect, as opposed to those of the British actors of his castmates, seemed unquestionably natural and authentic. Simon Russell Beale’s Beria, Jeffrey Tambor’s Malenkov, and even Michael Palin’s—a Monty Python Alumnus—portrayal of Molotov are all polished as they are believably bufoonish. The rest of the cast, including Rupert Friend, Tom Brooke, and Paddy Considine, made their moments their own without chewing up too much scenery.

I highly recommend this film.